Amazing Chinese Characters (820) Seven - 七

The shell bone script of the character for Seven 

The character original meaning is Cut: cut a stick into two parts.  One line is the stick, another is the knife. Some experts believe that the ancient Chinese were struggled to invent the character for seven, therefore, they borrowed the above character "Cut" because it pronunciation is same (Assume but highly possible). In sometime, the above character had two meanings: seven, and cut.

The bronze script of the character for Seven 

Similar to shell bone script.

The big seal script of the character for Seven 
 

Similar to older scripts.

At that time, people met a problem: the character for Ten is almost same as the character for Seven.

Let us see the small seal script of the character for Ten (Post 739)

 

Which is very similar to older scripts of character for Seven.

In order to distinguish the two characters, ancient Chinese had to make some change, therefore, we see 

The small seal script of the character for Seven 

The vertical straight line becomes curve line. 

The change may have started with big seal script, I just couldn't find the big seal script of the character for Ten, but other evidence proved the change happened in big seal script.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the original meaning of the character Seven is Cut, people borrowed the character Cut for character Seven. After borrowing, people might have used the meaning of seven much more than the meaning of cut. As time passed, people forgot it also means Cut or were confused on which meaning it stands for in the text. In order to remove the confusion, ancient Chinese in Zhou Dynasty, people added a radical Knife to character Seven to mean Cut. 

The big seal script of the character for Cut

The left is character Seven, the right is character Knife. The character Seven has diagonal line in horizontal direction, and curve in vertical direction. The change was forced to distinguish character Seven from character Ten. 

This kind borrow - return: borrow, takeover, return a different character is called "Fake Borrow".

The clerical script of the character for Seven

 

 The horizontal line, and down-curve right line replaced the vertical straight line to make it different from character Ten.

The song typeface of the character for Seven

Similar to clerical script.

The pinyin of the character Seven is Qi1.